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“We have watched brilliant, capable people writing on napkins, passing notes, writing on a whiteboard in person. The gestures, that eye contact – it means so much,” he said, underscoring the value of being present with one another. Those small exchanges that are so critical to ideas being shared and developed.

“Once a laptop is open, your attention is set on that. Our answer to that is Mezzanine.”

How It Works

The thinking was “to make a computer feel more like a whiteboard. More like clay.”

Oblong has essentially transformed computing (and much of the workplace) from a one person, one screen, one device experience to a fully shared, interactive one.

Mezzanine is a triptych digital workspace made of three connected screens. It works with a wand, as a sophisticated pointer. Pointing is a human gesture that nearly always gets attention. Thusly, the company emulated this human gesture and made it work for the digital world. The wand can also take a photo of anything on screen.

“These pixels belong to everyone in the room. Whatever device you bring into the room can also be used or participate,” he said.

You can push back the digital work space on the main screens and open a larger work area to find or feature deeper data or information. The tool allows you to augment a presentation and tweak it in real time.

Syncing Devices. Mezzanine works with laptops, iPads, a mobile app, and physical screens at the same time. Every device in the room becomes synchronized. Other devices in other remote locations can also sync with the meeting taking place through Mezzanine.

Sharing or Moving Content Instantly. Once you put a photo, document, or other content in the Mezzanine workspace, everyone has a copy. (There is no “email me those extra notes, after this meeting.” Instead, automatically everyone on Mezzanine has everything that was shared and created in the workspace, in real time).

Connecting Remote Locations. Through Mezzanine you can connect up to four different rooms. The rooms can be in different locations or time zones.

It gives democratic control of a meeting – meaning many different people can contribute at once, and work can be done at the same time. Once regular meetings become creation sessions.

It’s easy to imagine the connective tool being of value to researchers spread across various parts of the globe, the science community, and creative agencies, alongside the corporate sector.

For creative work, it allows for faster collaboration, prototyping, and storyboarding.

Workplaces Of The Future: 2066

Released in 2002, the film “Minority Report” was set 52 years into the future – in a 2054 version of Washington D.C.

For that film, Underkoffler was the chief computer visionary, responsible for imagining a futuristic vision of how computers would work in the future. Today Oblong Industries sells commercial versions of the “Minority Report” computers.

To imagine now another 52 years into our collective future seems daunting. Fifty-two years from now it will be 2066.

Underkoffler offered an idea of what that could be like, centering on the idea that we’ll all be collaborating a lot more. He described tools that “make the act of working as rich as the experience of cinema, the experience of music.”

“The future of work -- where we're going -- is an elastic canvas of interoperable pixels, in which process expands or migrates from device to device and screen to screen as desired or necessary, and in which -- most importantly -- a radically more capable, beautiful, and human UI makes collaboration effortless and inevitable.”